MEGATech Reviews: Nom Nom Galaxy for PC

Nom Nom Galaxy is the latest game in the PixelJunk series. You play as a lowly robot working for a soup empire, scouring distant planets for ingredients to make new and popular soups. It’s a simulation of a blue collar job and a realistic one at that. At times the work can be rewarding, and at other times it can be a frustrating, thankless grind.

This isn’t going to be like most videogame reviews. The protocol for reviewing games goes as such: play the game, beat the game, review the game. It’s simple, except when it isn’t. Nom Nom Galaxy proved to be one of those times when it wasn’t.

Q-Games doesn’t exactly hold your hand in Nom Nom Galaxy. Then again, in their defense, Nom Nom Galaxy isn’t a particularly complicated affair. Not on the surface, at least. You build an office, you build some soup machines and soup rockets, and you go about finding ingredients to combine into delicious soups. Pop a couple ingredients into a machine, let it mix, and then throw that can into a rocket where it will be delivered to waiting consumers.

It sounds simple, but to call it such wouldn’t be giving Q-Games their due credit. It’s a nuanced experienced, and once you start laying out your factory, clearing space for a farm, and figuring out the best ways to traverse the planet, all while racing against a rival soup company, you begin to realize that Nom Nom Galaxy’s simple mechanic rests within a very challenging framework.

Thrown in the Deep End

That framework is so challenging in fact, that it took four goes on the initial planet (after the tutorial) to beat my rival to 100% market share. And during the first three attempts, I never managed to grab more than 26% of the market share.

Surely my own comical ineptitude plays a part, but I don’t accept the full blame. I would’ve liked a little more direction. While playing Nom Nom Galaxy, I’m plagued with the feeling that there’s more to it than I’m fully understanding. Quick control shortcuts, better methods for precise digging and building placement, and other things like that. This is the sort of the game that immediately drives you to YouTube to observe other strategies.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. Nom Nom Galaxy is rooted in trial and error. Each time I went back I did a little better, employing helpful new methods I had picked up and discarding old ideas that didn’t work out. One thing I eventually realized was that I was getting too ambitious. The screenshots show gigantic, maze-like soup factories, but the factory that ultimately led me to victory held no more than four or five different soup machines in one long, horizontal corridor. I simply focused on what worked, rather than aiming for variety.

Stick to Soup

While the bulk of the gameplay is a business sim mixed with Terraria, Nom Nom Galaxy also features a tower defense component. Your rival will occasionally send ships to sabotage you and you’ll have to line the top of your buildings with guns to fight them off. You’ll usually have to climb up there yourself too, as the ships will frequently dip beneath buildings and out of sight of your towers.

I’m all for a little corporate sabotage, and I love the tower defense genre, but this element really feels tacked on. Not only does it add little, but it takes an already hectic experience and adds a level of frustration that doesn’t need to be there. What’s worse, you can’t send ships of your own, which would at least even the playing field a little.

Simple, Effective Presentation

Nom Nom Galaxy isn’t a AAA title, so it doesn’t look or sound like a AAA title, but that’s okay. The gameplay isn’t the only thing it shares with Terraria. The visuals are similar to the 2D sandbox title (or Starbound, for that matter) and the music and sound effects aren’t anything to write home about, but they work. What you see is what you get, and the screenshots represent Nom Nom Galaxy’s visual package just fine.

It’s the Little Things

The details are what really get under your skin. When you go to place a building, the screen will automatically zoom out a bit to give you a better view of what you’re working with. Unfortunately, this often resulted in me accidentally placing my building as the screen was moving and therefore placing it slightly off from where I intended – which usually meant I had to kill it with my buzzsaw, wasting the time and matter I put into it, and place it again.

Sometimes land that you thought would support a building will just give away under its weight and the building will sink down, which means it will be out-of-line with your corridor, which again results in the wasted time and matter of having to destroy it and rebuild it.

The buzzsaw is unwieldy, and I would constantly cut away land that I meant to leave intact. The only way to replace land is one block at a time, which is useless aside from having to fill a random hole. All this means that you need to be extremely cautious and slow, which is hard to do while the clock is ticking. And if you do end up cutting away more than you wanted to, you have to get creative with your building placement.

Yet despite all of these frustrating hang-ups, I found myself coming back to Nom Nom Galaxy again and again. You want to perfect it, almost in spite of all the nitpicks, as if they’re not flaws of the game but rather obstacles in the way of creating the ultimate soup empire. There’s nothing quite like Nom Nom Galaxy out there, and while it’s far from a perfect experience, it’s one that sim and crafting fans shouldn’t miss.

Even Robots Need Friends

Nom Nom Galaxy features a cooperative component, where you can team up with a friend to take on your rival together. Since I don’t know anyone who has the game, I didn’t get a chance to check it out, but it’s not hard to imagine what it would entail. Co-op play almost always doubles the fun of any game that offers it, and in this case have two players would cut down on a lot of the grind, too. It’s definitely something worth considering if you’re thinking about picking up the game.